Looks like the US isn’t the only country with right-wing anti-intellectual assholes in positions of power. Enter Japanese PM Shinzo Abe:

Humanities under attack [in Japan]

On June 8, all presidents of national universities received a notice from the education minister telling them to either abolish their undergraduate departments and graduate schools devoted to the humanities and social sciences or shift their curricula to fields with greater utilitarian values.

The bad tradition of evaluating academic learning and sciences in terms of their utility, with private-sector enterprises meddling in higher education, is still alive in Japan.

Indeed, policies related to higher education are under the control of the Council on Industrial Competitiveness, which is made up of nine Cabinet ministers, seven corporate managers and two scholars. One of the scholars is from the field of engineering while the other comes from economics.

A member of the education ministry’s panel of learned persons even said that the humanities and social sciences departments should be allowed to remain as they are only at the seven former Imperial universities and Keio University, and that those at other universities should be transformed into vocational training schools.

This person even went so far as to assert that students majoring in the humanities and social sciences at schools other than those eight institutions should be taught the Building Lots and Building Transaction Business Law instead of the Constitution, software programming for bookkeeping and accounting in place of Paul Samuelson’s “Economics,” and the skills of orally translating between Japanese and English rather than reading Shakespeare’s works.